Where are evacuation plans for Ohio's earthen dams?

Tuesday

Jun 2, 2015 at 12:01 AMJun 2, 2015 at 10:27 AM

For its size, Hawaii has a disproportionate number of high-hazard dams that could kill if they break. And 93 percent of them have a disaster plan to evacuate people from the path of oncoming water. Not so in Ohio.

For its size, Hawaii has a disproportionate number of high-hazard dams that could kill if they break. And 93 percent of them have a disaster plan to evacuate people from the path of oncoming water.

Not so in Ohio.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Dam Safety Program has led a steady but slow charge to set plans for the state’s most-hazardous earthen dams. The agency has yet to force owners of nearly a third of high-hazard earthen dams to complete those plans. And sometimes, even when plans exist, downstream neighbors don’t know about them.

>> Database: Dam failures in Ohio

>> Interactive map: Central Ohio’s high-hazard earthen dams

Ruby Frazee is among those people. She has lived along Jelloway Creek in Knox County since 1957. She has seen the normally tranquil creek rise from its banks and snatch her chicken coop in its floodwaters. That happened long before the Apple Valley residents’ association built a dam in 1971 to form from the country creek a lake for boating, swimming and fishing.

It’s now the largest privately owned lake in Ohio, and four decades passed before the residents’ association put together a comprehensive plan that details what the dam’s owners, emergency responders and downstream residents should do if the 91-foot-tall dam should fail.

Well aware that she lives in the path of floodwaters, the spry, 85-year-old Frazee has no idea what the official evacuation plans are. She has her own:

“Run like heck.”

“If something would happen to that dam, this little burg will be gone,” Frazee said of her town of Howard. “I just hope that they take good care of it.”

In the absence of stronger enforcement — and a heap of money — to make Ohio’s high-hazard earthen dams safer, the next line of defense is a strong plan for when things go wrong. As with many other states, Ohio has not effectively pushed all dam owners to plan for the worst.

Nationally, 392 state dam-safety inspectors police more than 87,000 dams. Experts say that states grapple with competing priorities, and dam safety often is not a high one. Still, Ohio does better than most in terms of staffing and funding. Other states such as Hawaii, Mississippi and Idaho do a better job of planning for the worst. Virginia does a better job of planning for the future.

“I can take my shoe off and pound the table all I want. The truth is, it’s a public-policy decision: What resources are you going to put toward what risk?” said Jim Morris, a former Ohio dam-safety engineer now with the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Working for government is so interesting because your clients and employers are the same people, and they don’t know it,” Morris said. “They want more services, but if you talk about how they want to pay for it, they don’t want to pay more taxes. You’re never going to get everything you need to do a satisfactory job. Once in a while, something will come up that will put a little more energy in the system, and then it will go away.”

In that sense, Buckeye Lake caused a power surge in Ohio.

>> Buckeye Lake dam: full coverage

>> Timeline: Follow history of Buckeye Lake and its dam’s problems

As its dam emergency unfolded, The Dispatch examined the status of 62 earthen dams in 15 central Ohio counties, as well as Ohio’s largest state-owned dams that are considered “high hazard.” That means that people downstream from the dams are likely to die if any fail.

Of those 62 dams, 50 lacked the required emergency plan, according to their most-recent inspection documents, which The Dispatch obtained through public-records requests. Some had older, less-specific plans that don’t meet safety standards or the law. Some had no plan.

Buckeye Lake didn’t get a full plan until this spring.

Some of the dams had not been inspected for five years or so. Newer inspection reports may show that the dams’ owners have since created the required plans. The department could not easily tell which dam owners still need to create plans.

Ohio has more than 460 high-hazard earthen dams.

ODNR, which owns and maintains 179 dams — 56 of them high-hazard — hasn’t taken a hard line with those it owns, either. Most are owned by its Parks and Recreation, Wildlife or Forestry divisions. A separate group, the Dam Safety Program within the Soil and Water division, inspects the dams and is supposed to make sure that state-required emergency plans are complete.

Of the 29 state-owned, high-hazard earthen dams reviewed by The Dispatch, 25 had no complete plan as of their most-recent inspection, according to state records. Among the dams without plans is one at Grand Lake St. Marys, the largest lake owned by ODNR, and one at Wolf Run Lake in Noble County. That dam, at 76 feet, is ODNR’s tallest earthen dam that is rated “high hazard.”

Rodney Tornes, who heads Ohio’s Dam Safety Program, said that every Ohio-owned dam has some sort of disaster plan, even if it falls short of what’s required by the law.

“Eventually, we will be pushing them harder,” Tornes said.

Other states do things differently when it comes to enforcement, inspection and recordkeeping. That includes emergency action planning.

Ohio is in a better position, it seems, than Indiana, which has 245 high-hazard dams. Only 45 of them have emergency action plans. Indiana’s dam program doesn’t have the authority to force dam owners to write the plans that protect their downstream neighbors.

But many states have become tougher enforcers when it comes to dams without solid emergency plans. Others write the plans themselves, no longer willing to politely plead with dam owners to get it done.

In Mississippi, it’s sometimes impossible to find the owners of about 570 dams built long ago through the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service and now owned by quasi-public landowner groups. There’s no one to take action against, essentially, and the state is unwilling to compromise on safety.

“A lot of the members are deceased; they don’t have a responsible owner. It’s in our interest to make sure they have emergency action plans. We’ve taken some of our funding and paid for the development of those emergency action plans,” said Dusty Myers, who oversees the Dam Safety Program in Mississippi. “Having an emergency action plan is really our only line of defense, the only tool we have in our toolbox, to protect people downstream.”

In 2006, emergency personnel in southern Ohio’s Pike County learned the importance of having an expertly detailed plan when Lake White began flooding during a massive storm.

According to that plan, Step One was to notify the park manager to unlock the floodgates. Step Two was to let the water drain out and prevent the dam from overtopping, which would weaken it.

At Lake White, failure happened at Step One. The disaster plan didn’t account for the possibility that phones would be out and that one person with the floodgate key would be unreachable. Another employee with a key lived 35 minutes away, delaying response.

Once a key arrived and the floodgates were opened, some floodgates malfunctioned.

The key now is kept closer. And the lake has new floodgates.

Lake White had the required emergency action plan by at least 2010 when state inspectors returned to assess the dam.

There are more privately owned earthen dams than state-owned ones, and they’re even more likely to lack a robust emergency plan.

“A lot of times, an EAP can be expensive and owners are unwilling to spend that money,” said Mark Ogden, who formerly was an administrator of Ohio’s Dam Safety Program and now is a project manager for the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. “A lot of tools have been developed to make it less expensive and easier to develop. That has helped increase the numbers.”

Some states have sought ways to help dam owners with the financial issues tied to dam safety. Virginia took a unique approach.

In 2008, the state Legislature passed a law to address the burden placed on dam owners whose dams wouldn’t be considered hazardous unless developers built homes or businesses downstream.

When builders pick a spot downstream from a dam, the county must notify the state’s Dam Safety Program. The program then tells the dam owner. Then, the local government can deny the development, it can ask the builder to move to a safer spot, or the developer can pay half the cost of the dam’s upgrades.

“One of the big issues across the country is hazard creep. It’s where you have a low-hazard dam, then people move in,” said Richard T. Bennett, who heads Virginia’s dam-safety program. At the very least, before developers move in and force costly repairs on an unwitting dam owner, “the owner then is faced with knowing the dollars of upgrades to their dams.”

Expense is an issue not just for dam owners, but also for states that must manage dams within their boundaries. Some states struggle with scarce dam inspectors and tiny budgets that must stretch between inspections and enforcement actions against negligent dam owners.

But Ohio isn’t one of those states. Its dam-safety office has one of the lowest rates of dams per inspector in the country and one of the larger budgets at $1.46 million. (There are more high-hazard dams per inspector than average, though.) Tornes, who oversees Ohio’s program, said resources aren’t the issue here. In fact, in recent years money started flowing to fix one or two dams a year. Last year was a banner year: Seven high-hazard ODNR-owned dams were repaired.

“We have terrifically ramped up our effort to address issues,” Tornes said. “The commitment made by this administration has been unprecedented.”

The commitment still results in a slow fix to a big problem. Many of Ohio’s earthen dams are aging and would probably kill people downstream if they failed, but relatively few are repaired each year.

jsmithrichards@dispatch.com

@jsmithrichards

jriepenhoff@dispatch.com

@JRiep

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